The years that novelist Sandra Benítez spent in El Salvador, where her father served as the commercial attaché for the American embassy, shaped her developing social consciousness in ways that she continues to explore in her fiction. Since the appearance of her first book, Benítez has enjoyed sustained critical and popular success because of her lyrical prose, the sweeping nature of her narratives, and her ability to create sympathetic characters. Readers find themselves identifying equally with the idealistic rebel and the idle rich, with the adulteress and the people whom the adulteress betrays. Her unemotional narratives of violence, poverty, and loss transfix audiences, taking them to places that do not exist outside of the television screen in their Westernized reality.

Benítez was born Sandra Jeanette Ables in Washington, D.C., on 26 March 1941. Her parents, James Q. Ables and Marta Bení...